Excerpt: Just starting your recruitment journey? Excited? Nervous? Don’t worry! We have compiled the top 15 tips for newbies like you to skyrocket your career from the very start. To find out, stick till the end.
Thousands of young professionals join the recruitment industry every year after learning the fame and wealth a “few” skilled recruiters have gained over the years.
But despite so many rookies, the recruitment industry still faces a shortage of talented HR professionals. Studies show that 50% of newbies in this field don’t last even for six months.
We don’t get surprised anymore by receiving tons of emails from young recruiters seeking guidance on succeeding in their recruiting journey.
So here we have brought you the proven roadmap to making the best out of your career in recruitment. These tips will take time to effect properly, but success is all yours once achieved.
Don’t Miss Out on These Hot Tips!
1. Use Modern Recruiting Tools
As technology evolves, the recruitment industry is adopting new methods and resources to streamline the hiring process. Adopting artificial intelligence and automation has helped agencies make hiring more effective and quicker. [You can do so by investing in the most Bullhorn alternative available in the market]
The usage of specific recruiting tools may differ according to your agency’s workflow or your client’s requirements, but most of the tools can be applied at various stages of recruitment.
Here are a few recruiting tools that every recruiter must use:
- Applicant Tracking System
- Video conferencing tools
- Resume Parser
- Social media
- Employer review site or an SEO-optimized website
- Virtual Reality communication tools
- Mobile application optimization
- Google Analytics
2. Prioritize Your Candidate Experience
Candidate experience defines how an applicant feels about your company and recruitment process. It involves engaging candidates and recruiters at different hiring stages like a job hunt, application, outreach, interview, and onboarding.
It is vital to prioritize candidate experience because candidates use their experience during hiring as a benchmark to determine how the company will treat them as employees.
Here are some tips to enhance your candidate experience strategies:
- Write relevant and diverse job descriptions: Job advertisement is the first thing most candidates encounter during their job search. They won’t apply for the position if it is not easily understandable.
- Provide clear instructions: The application process must be simple and accessible. Start by listing the open position on your career site and multiple job boards. Keep the question relevant and short. Send a professional confirmation email to candidates who have successfully applied for the post. [Don’t forget to use an email verifier to validate emails before hitting the send button]
- Maintain constant engagement: Candidates value interactions. They want to hear back from recruiters quickly about their application status, evaluation results, or response to their raised queries. Recruiters must stay professional and keep their communication channels open for better engagement. Use a professional video maker to make engaging videos for them to help in better communication.
3. Explore Remote Work Arrangements
Structured remote work arrangements can position your company at the pinnacle of the list for a much larger market of skilled individuals.
Modern conversation and collaboration technology have made remote work management more effective and accessible. Many high-functioning groups successfully leverage remote working structures to improve their EVP.
Remember that although a 100% remote structure may work for some teams, it doesn’t mean adopting an all-remote structure on yours is necessary. Some candidates sincerely require remote work flexibility.
Such flexibility may make a big difference in earning or losing a candidate’s interest entirely. Also, some candidates may demand a hybrid work culture according to availability and demographics.
In any case, providing a remote work arrangement can make you a preferred choice among candidates.
4. Encourage Employee Referrals
Employee referral is when a candidate is recommended by their acquaintance or the existing employee of the company for a particular job role. It makes the recruitment process much faster and cheaper and improves overall quality.
Here are some steps to set up an effective employee referral program:
- Choose when to ask for referrals. Will it be at the beginning of the hiring process or only for a specific position?
- Communicate your goals. For better referrals, your employees must understand your requirements clearly.
- Motivate and reward your employees for referring good candidates
- Track your employee referral metrics like the number of referrals vs. the number of hired referrals, no. of referrals per department, etc.
5. Practice Collaborative Hiring
Collaborative hiring is a type of recruitment in which members of the different departments are involved in the screening, interviewing, and decision-making stage of recruitment.
The goal of collaborative hiring is to eliminate bias and make better hiring decisions. It gives recruiters much better insight into candidates’ potential and help agency meet modern candidate expectations.
To bring collaborative hiring into effect:
- Determine why your agency needs collaborative hiring. Pitch your concept to your colleagues and explain its benefits.
- Map out all the requirements for collaborative hiring. It must include the process’s structure, resources, and expected outcome.
- Define roles for each member and communicate them clearly
- Create a diverse interview experience. Define the questions and evaluation parameters for each phase of the interview.
- Train the members for better interview outcome
- Improve with every hiring cycle.
6. Communicate a Strong Employee Value Proposition
EVP or Employee Value Proposition stands for monetary and non-monetary benefits a company offers its employees. A strong EVP incentivizes applicants and keeps them motivated throughout the process.
These are five ways to develop a strong Employee Value Proposition:
- Compensation: While income is not the only factor, it is still significant consideration for applicants in decision-making. Make sure you offer competitive compensation to the candidates.
- Work Environment: Offering candidates a comfortable and positive working environment improves their productivity and boosts their morale.
- Company Culture: Employees love getting recognized and appreciated. A positive work culture fosters trust and collaboration among employees, which boosts retention.
- Growth Opportunity: Employees stay with the company longer if they have enough opportunities to grow. Regular training, mentorships, promotions, etc., keep candidates motivated to work.
- Employment Benefits: Apart from monetary gains, today’s candidates also look for benefits like retirement benefits, paid leaves, flexible working hours, insurance, etc.
7. Value Quality Over Quantity
A good recruiter would never consider hiring a bunch of unskilled candidates just to fill a job position. They know how a bad hire can ruin the reputation of their agency and their client’s company.
Attracting a qualified candidate can be complicated, but here are a few steps to consider:
- Face the challenge: Knowing where your recruitment process is lacking is crucial before developing any strategies. Is there a shortage of talent in a particular niche? Is your company not good enough? Is your hiring process slow? Whatever the challenge you are facing, you must first address it.
- Adopt up-to-date recruiting techniques: The last year’s recruitment tactics may not be as effective this year. To beat the competition, you must stay updated with the current trends and industry guidelines.
- Make your application process interesting: Many candidates drop the application in the middle because it is too lengthy or boring. You must ensure that your application is devoid of biased and repetitive questions. Also, use gamification to improve its effectiveness.
8. Get Clear (and Realistic) About Timelines
Recruiting a good candidate takes an average of 42 days, much longer than the time in which a candidate is lost.
A good candidate applies for multiple job roles simultaneously. If you are taking too much time to hire, they won’t hesitate to give up on you entirely, especially if the candidate’s experience is poor too.
9. Seek and Embrace Diversity
Diversity and inclusion are no more alien topics in the recruitment industry, but still, many recruiters struggle to maintain diversity and avoid bias in their hiring process.
To keep your agency ahead, you must ensure that diversity is on the priority list of your recruiting strategies.
Here are some benefits of embracing diversity:
- It helps in strengthening your talent pool
- It improves the retention rate and productivity of the workplace.
- Different experiences, backgrounds, and opinions foster innovation and creativity.
- It improves your employer’s branding.
To attract diverse candidates to your job role, follow these steps:
- Set clear and realistic diversity hiring goals
- Make your online presence visible
- Train and educate your team members
- Use social media to improve employer brand
- Share your employees’ testimonials and videos on your website
- Use recruitment software to eliminate unconscious bias
- Write a diverse job advertisement
10. Know How to Reject
No matter how uncomfortable rejecting candidates may be, it is an inevitable part of recruitment. However, you can deliver the bad news in a much better manner.
Here are some tips for doing so:
- Reject the unsuitable candidates as soon as possible. Dragging candidates to the end of the hiring stage only to reject them wastes the resources and time of both recruiters and candidates.
- Personalize your rejection Emails. Provide candidates with the proper feedback so they can improve their weaknesses the next time they give an interview.
- Recommend to the rejected candidates some skills that they need to hone.
- Create a candidate survey and ask for their feedback.
- Stay in touch with rejected candidates. Maybe these candidates are not suitable for the current job role, but you never know when you will need them in the future.
11. Think Like a Marketer
Recruitment and marketing go hand in hand. Recruiters who think like a marketer have an advantage in today’s candidate-driven marketplace.
Recruitment marketing follows AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Actions) model to attract candidates to the job application and build a strong employer brand.
Knowledge of marketing principles helps reduce time-to-hire and cost-per-hire and boosts the overall quality of hire. It also helps in driving retention, enhancing candidate experience, and building engagement.
Recruiters can use marketing techniques at different hiring stages like:
- Engagement: Marketing-focused recruiters are keen to deliver and define engagement to increase candidate awareness and interest in the available position.
Their activities involve writing accurate job descriptions and cultivating the company’s culture through team building and candidate nurturing. - Interview: Interviews are not just for candidates’ assessment but also a touchpoint for selling the company to candidates. Modernizing the interview phase to suit candidate preferences is a part of recruitment marketing.
- Hiring: Recruitment marketing doesn’t end once a candidate accepts the job offer. It involves two phases: marketing the open role and maintaining long-term employment experience.
At the hiring stage, transparency is the key to recruitment marketing. The better the recruiter can communicate with their candidates, the more efficient the entire process.
12. Don’t Disown Previous Candidates
Every candidate you come across while recruiting is valuable, even if they are not suitable for the current job role.
Keeping contact with such candidates helps recruiters build a diverse talent pool that can benefit them while sourcing.
It is essential not to disown previous candidates because:
- These candidates fill in the open position when required in the future.
- The hiring process becomes two times quicker when you have access to qualified candidates.
- Since these candidates are already aware of your agency’s policies and application procedures, they don’t require much guidance every time.
13. Track Your Recruiting Efforts
Recruiting demands a lot of investment, but what are the chances that your investments are paying off?
Monitoring your recruiting performance through data-driven approaches and metrics is necessary to ensure your answer is up to the mark.
Here are some metrics every recruiter must track:
- Cost-per-hire: Lesser the cost-per-hire, the better the recruitment efficiency.
- Time-to-fill refers to the amount of time required to source and hire a new candidate.
- Time-to-hire: This metric emphasizes how quickly a candidate moves through each hiring stage.
- Source of hire: It highlights the effectiveness of your recruiting channel.
- Diversity of candidates: This data can be gathered through candidates’ surveys, feedback forms, employee dashboards, etc.
- Attrition Rate: This metric highlights how quickly a company loses its employees in a specific time.
- Quality of hire: It refers to the overall performance of hired candidates in their first year of work.
- Applicant per role: It helps determine the demand and interest of a particular job role in the marketplace.
- Offer Acceptance rate: This metric helps compare the number of candidates who accepted the job offer to that who received one.
14. Don’t Underestimate the Power of Automation
Like any other industry, automation has transformed the recruitment industry over the last couple of years. If any recruiter is still not taking advantage, they should live under a rock.
There are many benefits of applying automation in the hiring process. Some are:
- It increases productivity by streamlining most of the administrative tasks.
- It can improve the quality of your hiring efforts through predictive analysis and data-driven results.
- It enhances the candidate experience by quickening the response rate.
- It supports biased-free hiring.
- It reduces the time to hire by 40%
By using a good Applicant Tracking Software, you can automate various parts of your recruiting process, like:
- Job Advertising: Automating your job advertising process will help you target ideal candidates and reduce the cost per applicant by 30%
- Applicant Tracking: ATS can collect information and track the candidates by analyzing their search history, thus, matching them with suitable employers.
- Social Recruiting: Social media has become part of everyone’s daily life. Similar is the case with recruiters and job seekers. Automating social media posts and launching of recruiting campaign can help you build a robust online presence.
- Screening: ATS and recruiting tools like Resume parsers can help you screen out unqualified CVs and increase overall efficiency. Also, screening tools grade candidates based on their responses in pre-assessment tests that recruiters can further use to select candidates for the next hiring stage.
- Interview scheduling: ATS allows candidates to self-schedule their interviews and notify recruiters or other interviewing panels after matching the time with their availability.
In addition, automation benefits candidate rediscovery, background checks, nurturing, etc.
15. Write Better Job Descriptions
Even the best recruiters stumble on this point sometime, and it is perfectly normal. Practice is all that you need to ace your job advertisement writing skills.
Here are a few tips to consider:
- Briefly introduce your company or your client’s company. This introduction should involve the company’s goals, mission, and culture.
- Keep the job title clear and direct.
- Define the responsibilities and skills required to excel in the particular job role.
- Ensure that you mention competitive compensation and growth opportunities.
- Don’t use abbreviations, especially industry-specific ones.
- Keep it short, both the job description and the application process.
- Avoid using biased words.
- Use customizable job description templates.
In summary
These were the 15 recruiting tips that every recruiter, whether a rookie or experienced, must know and follow to improve their recruiting efforts.
Remember, the recruitment industry is competitive. You will need to set a clear goal and develop creative strategies to remain ahead in the market.
Here are some survival tips for the same:
- Be a willing learner. Get a mentor and clarify all your doubts first.
- Ask rather than struggle on your own. Your team members and seniors are there to help you.
- Start building your digital portfolio from the very first day.
- Treat candidates like they are the most precious beings.
- Compete with yourself. Try to break your own records. Competing with already established recruiters will give you nothing but a headache.
- Made a mistake? Take notes. Analyze where you went wrong and improve it in the following hiring cycle instead of taking it personally.
- Start networking. It is the only way to strengthen your presence. Get involved with the right people.
- Quality beats quantity.
- Follow the 15 tips mentioned in the article, and you are ready to go.
